Each node on the testbed is reachable via SSH. One main difference between DETER and Emulab is that DETER nodes are not accessible directly from the internet. In order to log into your nodes, you must first log into '''users.create.iucc.ac.il''' using your DETER username (not your email address) and password (or your SSH public key). From users you can log into your nodes. To save on connections, you might want to look into using GNU screen on users. Also refer to the Tips and Tricks section below for ways to make accessing DETER easier.

If you are, for example, running an internal web server on one of your DETER nodes, you can access it via SSH through users. For example to redirect port 80 on pcXXX to your local machine on port 8080 you would do:

ssh -L 8080:pcXXX:80 username@users.create.iucc.ac.il

Once logged in, you should be able to access the web server on your DETER node by going to http://localhost:8080. For more information on port forwarding with SSH, please refer to the SSH man page.

To use putty for port forwarding, configure putty to open a connection to users.create.iucc.ac.il

before you make that connection, set up the tunneling parameters. This example forwards local port 12345 to a remode desktop protocol server (port 3389) on a testbed node. select the Tunnels menu from under the SSH choice in the Connection menu on the left hand side. Add a forwarded port using the Local type, a local port number (12345 in the image) and the DETER hostname and port in the Destination field. In the example we are forwarding the connection to port 3389 (the remote desktop protocol) on pc102.

Be sure to press Add to add the port. The putty window will look like this:

Now open that connection. You will see a login prompt, and you should log in to users.

Now you should be able to point your local remote desktop viewer to localhost port 12345 and see the login screen of pc102. If the node is a Windows node, you will see something like this:

Be sure that your local machine does not firewall the local port 12345. Replace pc102 with a node in your experiment and the forwarded port with the port your service uses.

These configuration tweaks should work for any operating system that runs OpenSSH (Linux, BSD, and OS X typically use OpenSSH as the default SSH client).

It is possible to log directly into testbed nodes with a little SSH configuration tweaking. Adding the following statement to '''~/.ssh/config''' will allow you to skip logging into users in order to access a particular testbed node. Change MyProject to the name of your project.

You can log in multiple times using the same SSH connection. This dramatically speeds up creating new connections. To enable SSH connection multiplexing, add the following lines to ~/.ssh/config. If you are on a multiuser machine, you may want to store the control socket someplace other than /tmp.